


The Price of Anarchy

by lyrithim



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Catra (She-Ra) Redemption, F/F, Injury Recovery, POV Catra (She-Ra), Political Intrigue, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-12 11:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17466305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: Adora tries to change Catra; Catra tries to change the Horde. Both fail; both succeed.(The Catra-starts-a-quiet-revolution-inside-the-Horde story.)





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Like, “Adora followed Brightmoon way too easily” is a lukewarm take, but stay with me for now. This will still be following the moral framework provided by canon—just maybe fleshed out a little.
> 
> Also, this fandom is still fairly new so I haven’t immersed myself in a lot of meta/fanfic yet, so forgive any discrepancies with canon.
> 
> Note that some of the tags don't kick in until later sections.

Nimbus, of the skies, known to outsiders as a sovereign kingdom, was more accurately a collection of five hundred rogue airships and its people, sailing as a fleet over the upper atmosphere jet streams under the protection of the Rippling Malachite. Despite many subtle and unsubtle attempts by the Horde to launch an attack, the Kingdom of Nimbus had withstood invasion for months, the Horde lacking airships that could fly as high or as fast as those blessed by the runestone of flight. Eventually it was agreed that the Horde would send two representatives to Nimbus for the first round of fuel negotiations: Scorpia, of course, being the Horde’s nominal princess; and Catra.

For Catra, the Nimbus mission had been a nightmare from the start. First had been the travel. Entrapta had sent Catra and Scorpia upward to neutral air with her latest airship prototype—a dandelion-inspired model, with self-centering technology, lovingly nicknamed “Danny”—that was about as human-focused as the rest of her designs. After Catra finished throwing up off the side of the Nimbian-sent airship, she had the pleasure of meeting the Nimbian princess, who was, again, a teenaged brat, settled this time atop a scrap metal throne.

This princess’s defining feature seemed to be how much she simply was _not_ afraid of the Horde, what weaklings the other princesses and their kingdoms were to ever fear them, et cetera et cetera. Scorpia took all of it in stride, _ooh_ ing and _ahh_ ing whenever the princess pointed to a ship and proclaimed its superiority over all others with detailed explanations of how and why to the great distress of her advisors. Catra, on the other hand, was _very_ ready to kidnap a princess again, plan or not. It was then almost a relief when She-Ra and company stomped into the floating palace with their flying, talking unicorn.

“I’ll take Catra,” Adora called out from a distance. This was followed by glitter-princess’s usual, “Adora, no!” before Catra slunk behind the inner palace doors.

When Adora entered, Catra stuck out a foot, and all seven feet of She-Ra-the-warrior-princess-goddess landed flat on her face, sword sliding across the room. Catra pounced, and they grappled across the glass floor, clouds whipping past beneath them.

“I can’t let you do this, Catra,” Adora was saying.

“Glad to see you too.”

“You _have_ to know, Catra— The Horde—Nimbus—”

Catra rolled backwards, heaving Adora off her. “Okay, look,” she said, on her feet now, as Adora skidded across the room and retrieved her sword. “The Riviere Town mission I get—the Aurorae wedding you caught us red-handed—but this? Can’t the Horde have _peaceful_ diplomatic chats with other princesses now?”

Granted, she had been dropping off Entrapta’s mice bombs since arriving at Nimbus. But still.

“We know you’re after the Malachite,” Adora said, heaving herself up with the sword.

“Obviously, just like we know you’re trying to rebuild the Princess Alliance and destroy the Horde, ya-di-dah, what else have you got?”

“Catra,” Adora said, her voice going low now, almost confiding. “Ever since the Brightmoon invasion, I’ve been thinking—”

“Oh,” Catra said, “you’ve been _thinking_ now—”

“Light Hope was manipulating you in the Beacon,” Adora said. The way her eyes rounded then might have been more convincing, Catra thought, if they weren’t also the most alien features in her in She-Ra form. “She was showing you those things—whatever she showed you—so that you would turn against me. It’s—I know it doesn’t make sense, Catra, but to continue with my training I needed to let go of my attachments, and you, she said—”

Catra, who had become quite tired of everything coming out of Adora’s mouth, back-flipped onto a chandelier and pressed the necessary buttons in Entrapta’s remote controller. When the bombs went off in the distance they made no noise. Instead, a low groan reverberated throughout the metal hull of Nimbus’s flagship. Adora looked up, past her, as the ship began to tilt. Catra dug her claws into the ground; Adora, who knew that doing the same with her sword would very well shatter the glass floor, was knocked all the way to the side.

“What did you do?” Adora shouted, clinging onto the railing with one hand.

“Nothing that the Princess Parade can prove.”

“Don’t—”

“How slow are you?” Catra snapped, because Adora, after all this time, still didn’t _get it_. “You really think that I didn’t know? I made my decisions in that First Ones ruin, and you have to get that through your head.”

“Catra—”

“And frankly,” Catra added, as the floor shifted another degree down, “it’s rich of you to talk about manipulation when you hadn’t figured out Shadoweaver’s mind games until two year ago—and then went off with the first people to offer you _ponies_ and a golden tiara to crown yourself a hero. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? Point a sword wherever people tell you, never ask questions until you need to.”

Catra probably could have said more, but a ship had at that moment appeared by the railing that now swung below them both. Flying thousands of feet in the air, Scorpia waved cheerily. Before Adora could move an inch, Catra let go of her grip on the floor, sliding straight past Adora, through the window, and into Danny’s rocky embrace.

 

 

In her quarters, Catra paced the length of her bed in a terrible mood.

For an hour after she and Scorpia reported to the Command Room, Hordak had thundered and raged in his throne above, and Catra could hardly get a word in. They had failed terribly, he told them. Not only had they failed to steal the Malachite and destroy Nimbus’s flagship, they had let the Rebellion princesses succeed in rescuing the kingdom. The Rebellion had likely gained _another_ princess now, thanks to their incompetence—the alliance was growing stronger by the _week_ —this would take back the southern campaign by months, even years, and they had little time to lose given the recent loss of their western territories—

Not until a soldier brought in an urgent message from the Kingdom of Nimbus did Hordak pause in his tirade. Princess Claudia, the messenger had said breathlessly, sent her sincerest apologies to the princess and her cat-eared general. As a gesture of goodwill, Nimbus gifted Scorpia with the fastest of its new winged sailboats and sent an ambassador to the Fright Zone.

Catra watched as Hordak processed this news. It was true that Hordak had originally directed Catra to steal the Malachite. But she had promptly ignored that order, knowing—as well as he did, but refused to listen—that a runestone was useless when the bond with its princess remained intact.

Instead, with Entrapta’s mice bombs, Catra had done something simpler, and much more effective: created a minor engine failure by exploiting preexisting weaknesses in Nimbus’s flight system; casted doubt—as someone should have, anyway—on Nimbus’s complete reliance on a piece of technology made thousands of years ago; let them embarrass themselves. That the Rebellion came to trash their palace a little during negotiations was just a separate piece of luck.

But whereas Shadoweaver at least had the humor to take credit for Catra’s plan once it succeeded, Hordak’s face had still been dark during Catra’s explanations, still murderous and uncomprehending. She had to all but convince him that he had given them the idea in the first place. It was irritating, to say the least.

A knock at Catra’s door. Scorpia entered.

“Man,” Scorpia said, “Hordak did seem really mad at us even though everything worked out, didn’t he?”

“You were fine,” Catra said. “Lying and dodging questions are more my thing. You have other strong suits.” She flopped onto her bed, exhausted. “What did he want you to stay behind for?”

“Ah,” Scorpia said. “It’s, well, I—I think it’s good? But maybe it’s—I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s right to—how do I explain? Here.”

Scorpia handed her two pieces of paper in plain letterhead bearing the Horde’s seal. It was a new assignment, half a year long, for Scorpia and her garrison, in the old territories among the eastern deserts. She would be touring the cities and towns: Listen to the hearts and minds of the citizens in each. Distribute supplies. Reassure them of the Horde’s pledges for food, water, and shelter. It was an incredibly nonessential and time-consuming task for a major general.

Scorpia, for once, seemed to sense that there was more to this than met the eye, and was quiet. “What do you think?” she asked, rubbing her pincers together, a nervous gesture.

Catra read through summons carefully once more. The routes were fairly close to Scorpia’s homeland, and that made any dangers to Scorpia’s person less likely than what she initially suspected. Scorpia’s family was powerful in the Horde, but it was not because they held power in the Horde military—Scorpia was sent to the Fright Zone mainly as a token. The land that the family had originally occupied composed a good portion of the Horde territories. There were still many people more loyal to the royals in Scorpion Hill than the Fright Zone, sympathetic to the murdered king and queen and their living family. Nostalgia gave people all sorts of weird ideas about the ruling class, Catra thought, returning the summons to Scorpia.

“You’ll be fine,” Catra said. Most likely Hordak feared Catra’s influence over Scorpia and sought to separate them. Well, Catra wasn’t too much worried about that.

An idea came to her. With it, a plan began to form in her mind, unbidden.

“Really?” Scorpia asked.

“Yeah, take this time to visit your cousins, walk around your old towns.” Catra waved a hand. “Have fun, kiss babies, fix bridges—I don’t know what princesses do.”

“I wonder if anyone will still remember me,” Scorpia said. “I look different now. I work with the Horde.”

Catra folded her legs over Scorpia’s chair. “I don’t know,” she answered after a while, truthfully. “But you can always make a name for yourself in another way.”

Scorpia nodded.

Catra told Scorpia to write her, give her frequent updates. Scorpia agreed brightly. When asked about herself in these intervening months, Catra just gave a small smile, said that she would be busy.

 

* * *

 

Ignia at summertime sweltered under the boiling blue sky, Mt. Praevorius a smoldering giant at the corner of the eye, black smoke billowing incessantly from its clouded summit. Catra hid her Horde badges and uniform outside the city-state and covered her head and ears with a shawl. For a day and a half she wandered around the city temple, gathering intelligence, poking at the fortress for weaknesses here and there, and hissing at the locator beneath her pinned cloak. Entrapta had promised this new technology to be “Catra-proof,” but that didn’t make Catra like it any more.

It had taken Catra six weeks of cajoling and flattery to return to Hordak’s good graces. During this time—according to her letters—Scorpia had toured two towns and one minor city along the northern deserts, rescued five babies and two cats, fixed three wells, and built a bridge. Catra, on the other hand, had helped Entrapta rebuild old Horde gas and electrical infrastructure—meaning that she fixed up gas pipes and sewage drains in and out of the Fright Zone, and complained loudly about doing so to Entrapta. Only when Hordak finally ran out of competent operatives did he pass to Catra a new assignment: retrieve the Map of Etheria from the vaults of Ignia on the other side of the planet.

The pursuit for the Map had been in place since Entrapta cracked the code on the data crystal that Catra had stolen from the First Ones ruin, almost two years ago now. The Map, Entrapta had explained, was not a geographical map of the planet, but rather a blueprint into its fundamental workings: every slice of integrated circuit, every plot of diodes and triodes and semiconductors stretched over the fabric of this world. Entrapta had caught the name of the Map in the ancient tongue, repeated, in the thousands of metadata files that had suddenly become available to the Horde, and in the end determined its location to be Ignia, a volcanic hotspot in a planet without a liquid core.

When the sun hit the horizon on Catra’s second day in Ignia, there came three long and heavy gongs by the acropolis, where laborers had spent the day building a giant bonfire for the Festival of Praeva. All of the townspeople and nobles swept uphill, singing and laughing and dancing. Catra, cloaked, went the other way, slipping by two guards to enter the emptying temple.

Past the forecourt and the maincourt and their polished marble stones, past the statue of the anthropomorphized Praevorius in great beard and toga, Catra followed Entrapta’s contraption and found a hidden door marked with First Ones writing. The chamber on the other side was as warm as a furnace, though the only visible sources of heat were two candles lit at the entrance of a long, dark hall. As Catra walked down the hall, the heat grew more suffocating, and a curious muffled roaring, like falling water, grew louder. She emerged on the other side claws bared and defensive. A cascade of lava came into view, at least ten stories high, spitting curls of fire in its descent.

There was no other path forward save for a small platform that fed into a narrow bridge. The bridge itself shot straight through the magma-waterfall.

Catra stepped gingerly onto the platform. A holo-screen appeared, and the blocky outline of a woman stared back at Catra with hollow eyes. For a second Catra thought it was Light Hope again, but this projection was of a different color—a dull, staticky pink—though the silent contempt in her expression was the same.

 “Of course,” Catra said. “Just great.”

“Access requested,” Light Hope Lite intoned.

“Alright, I get it,” Catra said. “Shut yourself down and I’ll come back—”

“Detected: Catra, the navigator, and She-Ra, the protector,” Light Hope Lite said. “Permission granted.” And the screen dissolved.

Catra whipped around just in time to spot Adora—all of two feet behind her, god Catra forgot how good she was at this—and tackle her to the ground. But Adora squirmed out of the grapple easily and clambered to the other side of the bare platform, panting as she stood. Behind them, there was a heavy metal groan, and the cascade of lava began to part.

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?” Catra asked.

“Me?” Adora asked. She was all Adora this time, ponytail bunched up and dark brows furrowed, five-feet-seven instead of seven-feet-five. There was a satchel over her shoulder, and she looked to have been traveling. “I was here on vacation for the festival—because I like festivals—and then I saw _you_ sneaking around and then breaking into the city’s sacred _temple_.”

“Alright,” Catra said, grinning. “I guess you have a point there.”

“Catra,” Adora said again, and Catra dropped her smirk. “I have been thinking about what you said last time, and I— I think there are things about the world outside of the Horde that I need to show you. It’s _different_ out here, Catra. It’s—wait!” but Catra was already sprinting across the bridge.

“Save your speeches for the princesses, Adora!” Catra shouted behind her.

Past the parted magma curtains, past a low tunnel, Catra skidded into a rocky, cylindrical chamber. The walls there were engraved with First Ones’ script. The air was cooler. Catra could hear the drumbeats and songs of the Festival of Praeva above them. A small square opening in the ceiling allowed sunlight to illuminate the entire floor, and Catra could see vines webbing over the ceiling and spiraling down yellowed columns. On the other side of the chamber, a small, translucent orb bobbed gently above a stone dais.

Catra spent too long looking, and this time she was tackled to the ground. Above her, Adora said, “Listen to me—” then, after a pause, breathless, “The Map of Etheria.”

“That’s right,” Catra said. She kicked Adora off of her, but Adora was just as fast to roll and return a sweeping kick as Catra attempted to stand. Soon they found themselves in a fall-out brawl again—a sparring match, Catra thought, just like the old days.

But even though Catra had survived two years now of the Horde and Hordak without Adora, even though Catra had become a smarter fighter—a meaner fighter—for it, she still fell too easily into old patterns and was caught unawares when Adora switched up her attacks.

At least, that was how Catra explained the pastry that Adora had stuffed in Catra’s mouth.

“Mmfgh?” Catra managed, more confused than angry.

“Chew,” Adora commanded.

The pastry was fluffy and sweet and dolloped with cream. Even though it might very well be poisoned, instinctively—and stupidly—Catra swallowed.

“That’s called a cupcake,” Adora said, eyes still bright and angry, across her. “I bought it across the temple from a nice lady. It’s delicious.”

“The hell, Adora. I know what a cupcake is. Entrapta makes them all the time—”

This time when Adora pounced, she shoved a dark chocolate ball between Catra’s teeth. But it wasn’t just chocolate, Catra thought.

“Brigadeiro,” Adora said. “Glimmer’s mother prepared them for me before I left.”

Below her, Catra swallowed before saying, “Mind telling me why on _earth_ did you just feed me something that Brightmoon’s queen mother made?”

“One more,” Adora reassured her, before popping a pink ball in Catra’s mouth. This pastry’s exterior was soft and sticky, but once Catra bit in—

“Mochi,” Adora said now, with a savage sort of triumph, “with the Kingdom of Snow’s never-melting ice cream as filling.”

—and it tasted like heaven.

With a heave from Catra, they switched roles, Catra on top holding Adora down.

“What,” Catra said, “the hell.”

“You asked me what made me leave the Horde,” Adora said. “When I left the Whispering Woods, there was a festival—a lot like this one—and the people there, they sat me down and fed me food that I had never tasted before—”

“Oh god, Adora. Food?”

“My point is that there are things outside of the Horde—really wonderful things—that you and I never got to see, Catra. There are things called _birthdays_ and _aunts_ and _games_ that you play with friends just for _fun_ , and every single day I look around and see them—”

“That’s not the point, Adora,” Catra said, all good mood evaporated. “Really? You thought you could bribe me over from the ‘dark side’ with _desserts_ and, what’s next, flowers and horses? You really did leave me because of—”

“No, it’s not that, you’re not listening—”

“I hear you just fine,” Catra said. She leapt from Adora’s shoulders, caught a hanging length of vine from the ceiling, and swung herself toward the orb. When she grabbed the Map of Etheria from the dais, warmth coursed up her fingertips. The orb shone so bright that she almost missed the reappearance of Light Hope Lite in front of her.

“Transaction completed,” Light Hope Lite said, her voice caught up with static, distintegrating with each syllable. “Thank you for using our services. We will now begin the shutdown procedures.” And then she blinked out of existence once again.

Catra grabbed onto a column just as the stone floor beneath her began to rumble. From a corner of the chamber, the ground split open. A geyser shot up into the ceiling.

Catra caught the edge of the square ceiling opening just as Adora transformed into She-Ra below her. Before heaving herself over to the surface, into the sunlight, Catra saw the floor crumple beneath Adora’s feet. Adora, with a shield braced against the ground, surfed upward with the geyser, as practiced as everything else she had ever done.

 

 

After initial delight at the Map’s retrieval, Hordak found the progress of breaking open the Map’s secrets far too slow-moving and, losing interest, left that task to Entrapta in favor of pursuing a more aggressive military campaign against Plumeria. Entrapta was more than happy to study another piece of intricate First Ones technology and would spend hours telling Catra of all the “obvious bugs in First Ones infrastructure” that she could fix now.

“Before, it was like trying to put together a puzzle without knowing just what the heck the puzzle is supposed to look like,” Entrapta told Catra in her lab, after they determined that Hordak’s eavesdropping bat-baby-pet was not present. “Now I finally see bits and pieces of the _right answer_ , do you know what I mean? The big picture.”

The clear sphere that was the Map of Etheria now sat prettily atop a plush red pillow. It was projecting a three-dimensional diagram of the planet’s south-southwestern hemisphere. They hadn’t reported to Hordak on this set of progress yet for the Map. If Catra had her way, they would never.

What they knew was that no other machinery except Catra’s presence was required turn on the Map—and no other piece of machinery that Entrapta produced could coax the Map into working. Entrapta had found this fact delightful, cooing over the orb and calling it a “fickle lady.” Catra was less delighted; this was another excuse for Hordak to keep her on a short leash.

She was slouching by Entrapta’s window now, watching rows of Hordak’s tanks riding to south. In the east, she knew, Scorpia had recently resolved a decades-long tribal conflict between the Arachnes and the Crustaces. Meanwhile Hordak was waging more wars. Beside Catra, the Map was projecting into the air a hologram of all the runestones in the world and their connecting networks in a giant, glowing web.

“Imagine now,” Entrapta continued happily. “Once we crack this thing we will be able to be able to redirect First Ones ley lines to—well, fixing Mermista’s Sea Gate was something Adora had already done. But also, discovering just why it was that, say, Sanditon has been hit by _seven_ sandstorms in the last two years—now that’s a statistical anomaly if I’ve ever seen one. Or the drought around Scorpion Hall that Scorpia wanted us to investigate—and the strange seal migrations around the cryosphere too—”

“You and Scorpia,” Catra said, suddenly angry. Entrapta’s lab was the last place she thought she would be reminded of Adora, but here she was. “Don’t you think it’s a bit arrogant of you? Believing you can, what, just up and change things in the world? When so many other people have tried and failed, over and over again.”

After a moment Catra finally turned to face Entrapta. But Entrapta didn’t look furious. She had tipped up her welder’s mask, and her wide, curious eyes were fixed on Catra’s face. Catra was reminded, uncomfortably, of another time, closer to the start of Entrapta’s defection, when Entrapta had gazed upon her with similar fascination and pronounced her “a messy circuit of dismissal and fear running in series with only performed sociopathy as a means of resistance.”

“You have been trying to steal power from Hordak since—the Nimbus mission, I think. Maybe before,” Entrapta said, head cocked to one side. “Through me. Through Scorpia. But you’re planning on crowning Scorpia queen.”

“Yeah,” Catra said. Next to her, the glow of the orb dimmed then grew, dimmed then grew, as though in warning. “You caught me.”

“You will try to overthrow Hordak,” Entrapta said. “A coup, as they call it, is coming.”

“Yes.”

“Why stage this coup?” Entrapta asked. “What will you gain from it? To you, what would the difference be between Hordak and Scorpia?”

“Scorpia would take me seriously.”

“Hordak does take you seriously,” Entrapta pointed out. “But you disagree with his plans and disobey him. Just like how you promised you would keep the fact that I intend to fix other parts of Etheria—the parts not under Horde control—from Hordak.”

Catra, furious now, plucked the sphere from its pillow. The network of runestones faded from the room, and the space looked oddly small.

“Scorpia is dumb and naive,” Catra said, “but Hordak is a moron. That’s the difference.” Then she swung out the door.

 

* * *

 

Following a bad harvest and a wildfire, the Horde’s grain redistribution system broke down with the roads, most of which were hastily built more than a century ago for military use. By late fall there were a series of uprisings along the edge of the Horde’s occupied territory. People were hungry, people were trapped. Violence boiled across the border—save for the northern deserts, where Scorpia had been renegotiating trade with nearby pockets of Horde occupation and neighboring Brightmoon.

Kingdoms outside of Horde control took notice of Hordak’s weakness. In the south, the issue of Beast Islands, an archipelago of largely unsettled land between Salienas and Ignia, flared up again as Princess Mermista challenged the Horde for the territory. Hordak sent Catra and a fleet of thirty ships to the island chain. War was imminent.

When Catra met Mermista’s ships in the Bay of Pacalis, Salienas, under the banner of the Rebellion, asked for one last attempt at negotiation. Catra agreed. She and a small contingency of Horde soldiers gathered at the Pacalis Bay Lighthouse at dusk. In the topmost chamber, she waited alone.

The Salienas representative arrived on time. It was Adora, in She-Ra form. Her eyes were steely.

“Hi, Adora,” Catra said. “What, no little gifts for me this time?”

“Catra, stop this,” Adora said. “We can end it now, and no one will get hurt. Please.”

“So you’re saying that Salienas has rightful claim to this territory?”

“No, it’s—it’s not about the islands. Just, can’t you see? There’s no point to this—we’ll just be hurting the people who are sitting on those boats right now, willingly or not.”

“Up until eighty years ago,” Catra recited, “Beast Islands were part of Plumeria. Then the Continental Wars happened and Beast Islands switched hands to Salienas, before the islands were sold to the Horde after the fall of the first Rebellion to repay war debts. The islands have been with the Horde for almost a century now, peacefully. Is your friend Mermista claiming rights to the islands despite of this?”

“Tell me,” Adora said. “Tell me, please. Tell me what I’m not understanding.”

Catra lifted her head. She wanted to tell Adora that this was a peace talk between two military powers—a meaningless squabble over a few chunks of dead rocks, but a peace talk nonetheless—and Adora could at least try to focus on that instead of engaging in their personal histories. She wanted to tell Adora to fuck off, because Adora had never asked Catra what she wasn’t understanding about her, growing up in the Horde—and not until now, when Adora needed to help out her other princess friends.

And still she wanted to tell Adora the answer: that given the chance, if Catra was still that poor abandoned orphan child on the streets, and Salienas or Plumeria or whatever other kingdom Adora thought she was allied with had access to the same weapons and _power_ that the Horde did now, they would not hesitate to do the same to Catra and others like her, or worse. The fundamental distinction between the Horde and the other lands was not good or evil, but the chance to fend for themselves and the failure to do so at their own expense.

Before Catra could give into another moment of weakness, however, and say anything else, there came a crowd of noise from the distance, crescendoing into a roar: panicked shouts and stampeding feet, Catra knew, from the decks of Salienas’ ships. Sure enough the door opened, and a Salienas sailor said, “Spies from the Horde have set our ships on fire—please, help us!”

“You look surprised, Adora,” Catra said, to the flash of hurt and betrayal across Adora’s face, with which Catra had gotten more than familiar. Catra stayed behind as Adora left the chamber.

Adora did manage to demolish a couple of Catra’s ships in the end, but it was no use. By dusk, the Horde sailed easily through the Bay of Pacalis with minimum casualty, and the fire-starters—which composed of Catra’s old squadron, led by Lonnie—returned safely to shore. Because Catra had ordered archers to shoot incendiary arrows as a first round of defense, and because the network of propaganda within the Horde was brutally efficient, none but Catra and the old squadron knew about the sabotage.

All throughout the Horde-occupied lands, people heard of Catra’s triumph: how Princess Scorpia’s closest comrade had earned them yet another victory, this time with just thirty ships against the Rebellion’s eighty.

 

 


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Showdown at Dryl Castle.

Hordak kept most of his enemies—the ones he did not execute—in the Lightning Tower, erected decades ago at the edge of the Fright Zone. It was easily the tallest manmade structure one could see for miles around and looked, to Catra and Adora when they were young, like a block of cheese tacked onto a sky-scraping needle. A giant, multi-headed snake rumored to be Hordak’s childhood pet guarded the base of the Tower, while the block at the top held the Tower’s prisoners.

A sentence to the Tower normally equated isolation for life, and soldiers stationed near it would often report hearing the screeches of its maddened prisoners when the winds hit the surrounding deserts especially hard. But when Catra had asked for access to the Tower as his second-in-command, Hordak had agreed easily. Perhaps it amused him.

It was two weeks before Scorpia was due to return to the Fright Zone, triumphant, flushed with new towns and new people pledging loyalty to the Horde—through their loyalty to her and Scorpion Hall. It was then that Catra paid the Lightning Tower another visit.

“Shadoweaver,” Catra said now, lazy, from the other side of the cell door. “How have you been doing?”

There was no movement from the shadows in the cell. But Catra could hear the woman’s quiet breathing: thin, ragged, and shorter than the last time. Catra waited.

“What do you want now?” came the reply.

Catra paused, thinking. When she made her other visits she would circle the topics a little. But there was no point now.

“Hordak is going after She-Ra,” she said.

Shadoweaver leaned toward the bars slowly. A part of her gaunt, ashen face came into light. “Why?” she rasped.

“She had cut down seven ships on her own in a battle.”

“But you had burned down eighty.”

“You’ve heard.”

“Of course,” Shadoweaver said. “I am not helpless, no matter what you or Lord Hordak may think of me. I have my resources.”

Catra got over her surprise quickly and said, “You’re not afraid to tell me that?” She grinned. “That I would report back to Hordak, and he would take away those ‘resources’?”

“If Hordak has targeted Adora,” Shadoweaver said, “either he or you will not be standing soon. There is no point.”

Catra’s tail twitched at that. She did not like the implication in Shadoweaver’s words, especially since she had guessed her plan—even though the motives completely wrong, of course. But the surest way of falling into Shadoweaver’s traps was to rise to her bait, so Catra moved on.

“She-Ra’s been a thorn at his back for a long time. This was just the last straw,” Catra said. “And anyway, Hordak has always been more afraid of someone who looks good with a sword than someone who’s good with a knife.”

“Indeed,” Shadoweaver said, her beady eyes unmoving from Catra’s face. “And I suppose you’re interested in exactly where one should stick that knife? For curiosity’s sake.”

“For curiosity’s sake,” Catra agreed.

 

 

When Catra had first brought Entrapta forward to Hordak as an asset rather than a prisoner, Entrapta had babbled enthusiastically about any and all things that came to her mind. Even Hordak had to ask her to stop. But among the topics, Catra remembered, was the mention of a viral data crystal that had corrupted She-Ra when Adora had visited the Kingdom of Dryl. Catra, being who Catra was the time, had remembered this with searing detail, but she hadn’t expected Hordak to, and certainly did not expect him to spearhead its retrieval two weeks after the Battle of Pacalis Bay.

Now, with only ten days before Scorpia’s return, Catra stood behind Hordak at the helm of his ship as they glided up the rocky mountainside, the night air scarring her cheeks.

None of the members of the skeleton crew onboard were unfamiliar with Catra, and it occurred to Catra then that Hordak must have other crews in his pay, and if so what other secrets did he keep? So throughout the entire journey she had stayed silent, holding her back so straight that her muscles burned. Hordak had not informed even Entrapta of his plan. Catra suspected that she herself would have been left in the dark if it weren’t for her newfound usefulness with the Map, which now floated by her shoulder, gently illuminating the way.

When they arrived at the summit, the moon hung large and bloated overhead. Entrapta’s castle stood below, at the trough of two peaks, a mess of chimneys and metal plating. Though quieter and darker, empty now of its former inhabitants, it looked exactly as Entrapta had described, and that calmed Catra quite a bit. Hordak disembarked and called for Catra. She was to find the location of the crystal and report back to him. She entered the castle, alone.

Catra had let Entrapta know of Hordak’s plan as soon as she left the Command Room—without the suspicion of Entrapta’s betrayal having passed Catra’s mind, she later realized. But by then Entrapta had given Catra no reason to doubt her, setting Catra up with the usual suite of gadgets, as well as the blueprint of the castle and an override remote, which would allow Catra to control all of the Dryl automatons by voice. Entrapta’s only request was for Catra to save the attendants of the Dryl castle, if Catra should encounter them. A simple sweep of the castle now revealed it to be devoid of inhabitants. Most likely they had sought refuge with the Rebellion after Entrapta defected.

With Entrapta’s blueprints in mind, the metal plating and spartan dressing of the walls and floors were not ugly and foreign—the real thing seemed more to Catra like the paint strokes filling in an artist’s outline. The occasional ticking and mechanical rumblings only added character to the place, and Catra thought she could see the beauty of the design, and how it must have hurt Entrapta to have wanted to leave a place like this. The data crystal itself would be in the castle’s own central command room, on the fourth floor. Catra took her time looking for it—Hordak would be too suspicious, she thought, if she returned quickly.

The darkness here, too, was familiar to her. It had been in the darkness that she was torn away from her mother’s arms all those years ago when the Horde invaded the then-kingdom of Felino. Catra had fought hard enough against her captor to scar the Horde soldier’s cheek, and for that she had been sent—again in the dark—to a training facility in the southeast. There, while marching in the fields with dozens of other children all day with a dull bayonet strapped across her back, she had met a little blonde girl with round ears and no tail.

Catra opened the door to the central command room, the dim glow of the Map straining to reach the edges of the tall ceiling. At the other end of the room, the data crystal glinted green. She went to pick it up. It was heavier than it looked, and she could almost feel the malevolence humming in its wiring.

At once she heard soft, steady footsteps behind her.

“You found it,” Hordak said.

“I did, my lord,” Catra said, immobile. A chill ran up her spine.

“Very well done,” he said. And he was moving—not directly toward her, by the sound of his voice, but circling the room, perhaps admiring it. “Very well done indeed.”

“Thank you.”

“You know, I had my doubts about you after the Nimbus mission,” Hordak said. “But you have redeemed yourself with time. From the Pacalis Bay battle and from this, you have proven your loyalty to me, and your determination to the cause.”

Catra held the crystal tighter. On her shoulder, the orb glowed white and hot.

Catra had learned the name of Hordak sometime between the ages of four and fourteen, learned to love and worship and fear that name, learned to maim and kill and hate in his honor and for the honor of serving under him. She had learned to do so as other kidnapped children had. As Rogelio and Kyle and Lonnie had. As Adora had. Too bad for Hordak that, unlike Adora, Catra had also learned that Hordak himself, with all his commands to maim and kill and hate, was nothing more than a bad leader in a bad cape.

She reached down to her right thigh with her other hand and felt the grip of the dagger. With the other she held Entrapta’s robo-control remote. Calm spread over her.

She fitted the crystal into a box she had prepared for this occasion, then clipped it behind her belt.

There would be no better opportunity to depose of Hordak than this, she knew. In ten days Scorpia would be returning to the Fright Zone, victorious, her citizens newly energized behind her. With the Command Room empty, she would take over the Horde’s misshapen throne by default. Catra would live to see to it.

_Scorpia will be a better queen than you ever could be_ , Catra thought, in Hordak’s direction, the freedom of it thrilling.

“Thank you, my lord.” Catra unsheathed her claws and faced Hordak at last. “I am honored.”

 

 

The end of the fight was Hordak—who, in a twist, was something like a robot/dark manifestation/First Ones bug/anti-Etheria virus/unholy freak of nature—lying, still, on the ground. Deactivated, hollow—and perhaps dead, but probably not. Entrapta’s valiant bots scatter across the floor, most of them in pieces. Catra, across the remnants of the room, leaned against the intact doorway. She was struggling to stay on her feet, struggling to breathe.

She could barely open one eye, and she wasn’t sure if the other was sealed over with blood, or because Hordak had gotten to it after all in one of their scrapes. There was a cut across one side of her chest, she was sure, and her left femur might be broken from one of her drops. It was all hard to tell. Her nervous system, overloaded, was signaling feeling in strange ways; there were so many parts of her body that were simply in pain.

Behind her, she heard footsteps. Likely from Hordak’s men, following the sound of explosions that had blown apart the ceiling minutes before. Above Catra, the same moon Catra had seen an hour before shone down on her. The orb that was the Map of Etheria floated before her nose. There was no glow from it now besides the moonlight. All the orb did was distort the world behind it, flipping its image upside down.

Someone very close was shouting—he had found the way to Hordak, it seemed. One of the lackeys on the ship.

More footsteps pattered closer. It was difficult to reach for the dagger again—Catra’s hands were so slippery with blood, her own, that she could barely hold onto the wall as it was. Still she managed, pushing herself upright, readying for another fight.

_Catra_ , a voice was saying. The orb still did not glow, but—and this must be from her own imagination, her own fatigue—the space around it seemed to distort with the refracted moonlight.

There was pounding behind Catra. More shouts.

_Navigator_ , the voice continued, the voice that Catra finally recognized as Light Hope Lite’s. _Where do you wish to go?_

Where did she want to go? Catra thought.

A split of light cut down the space in front of Catra, starting from the heart of the orb then expanding outward to both sides. A portal, Catra thought. She could feel it in her bones.

“It will give soon!” someone was saying.

With no way left, Catra stepped forward. With a tip of her tail, she let herself fall forward.

 

* * *

 

 

Somewhere in the world, Catra woke in fits and jerks, sixteen years of military training urging her against sleep, with her own body’s fatigue fighting for it. Nightmares twisted and braided with her sense of reality: she was back in the Fright Zone, safe in her own cot; she was in the Black Garnet Room, in the Brightmoon princess’s place; she was sneaking into Shadoweaver’s room with Adora; she was in the belly of the Lightning Tower’s guard-snake; she was facing Hordak all over again.

“You have failed, Catra,” Light Hope Lite was saying, before morphing into Scorpia, then Entrapta, then into Hordak’s little winged spy. It flew right at Catra’s face, jaws opened impossibly wide. She screamed into a sea of dough-like blackness.

Then, close to her, Adora’s voice said: “Catra, you’re safe—please. Catra, you’re safe.” And though Catra could not hear her, she could feel the warmth of her arms around Catra’s waist. Because this was a dream, Catra leaned in, and let herself breathe, and breathe.

 

 

Catra woke fully at last and found, as before, that only one of her eyes could open. But this time the other was wrapped over with heavy bandage, smelling of fresh linen and medicinal salve.

She was in a bed, one that was not wide but generously soft and smelled like lavender. The room itself was small as well, with two narrow windows set into the roughly plastered brick walls. The windows let in waning, orange afternoon light, and there was a clear vase of flowers on the window sill closest to Catra. Her face guard and belt, wiped clean of blood, rested atop a plain bedside dresser. The Map was placed upon a pillow next to them. On the other end of the bed, in a chair, Adora slept face-down over the duvet.

Catra jerked upright. The motion pulled at the stitches above her abdomen that she hadn’t known existed. She let out a sharp hiss.

At once Adora was awake and onto her, plying apart Catra’s hands. “Don’t move, you idiot—there are stitches _—_ ”

“I know that _now—_ ”

“Shh, let me see,” Adora said, tapping at the bottom of Catra’s shirt. Or rather, the shirt Catra was wearing—it wasn’t hers. Still Catra obliged. “Don’t move.”

With cool fingers, Adora tapped against the bandages around Catra’s waist. Catra didn’t dare to breathe, she kept so still. Catra rolled down her shirt when Adora was done.

“You’re clear,” Adora said, pulling back. Then, when Catra moved to leave the bed, Adora pressed her wrist down. “No, you are not going anywhere. You have at least two major bone fractures and needed _sixty-seven_ stitches in total—and your _eye_ — There were so many times I thought you wouldn’t— Catra, what happened to you?”

“I was—” She couldn’t think of a good lie quickly enough. “—playing with robots.”

Adora’s expression twisted into something unreadable. Catra didn’t have anything to respond to that either. So she looked away.

“What is this place?” Catra asked.

“It’s a house,” Adora said. “My house.”

Catra had figured as much with the décor. “I meant _where_ are we?” she asked, impatient. “In relation to a kingdom, or the Horde, or whatever. Please don’t tell me you’ve brought me to Brightmoon.”

Adora looked at her carefully. “We’re near Thaymor. Where did you think we would be?”

Catra picked at the blanket over her legs and did not answer her. Thaymor was on the other side of the Horde’s area of occupation in relation to Dryl. No matter what had happened to Catra while she was unconscious, there was no way she had rolled, half-dead, all the way here. She looked at the Map. It sat daintily, innocently atop the dresser.

“Catra, what is going on?” Adora said. “I find you at my doorstep one night unconscious and bloody—with what are _clearly_ combat wounds across your body. If you hurt anyone in the Rebellion—”

Catra had to laugh at that.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Catra said. “It definitely was not. Pretty sure that bastard won’t stay down for long anyway.”

“So there’s someone,” Adora said, face paling. “Who is it?”

Catra placed a finger on her lips. When Adora looked to argue again, Catra cut in: “Trust me, if anything, you’d approve. Besides,” she added, “are _you_ going to tell me what’s going on with you? Why you are all the way out in Thaymor alone, without Princess Glitter and Bow Boy?”

Adora was silent.

“Thought so,” Catra said. “Sorry for bleeding all over your doorstep now. I’ll get out of your hair as soon as I can.”

“Catra—”

“And thank you for your concern. And help. Really, I do appreciate it,” Catra said. “But I think for now I think I’ll sleep.”

Then she rolled to her side. When Adora finally left the room, Catra opened her eyes and stared at the wall opposite for a long, long time.

 

 

Catra should be reveling in her good fortunes like anyone else would have done in her position—she had, after all, just survived a death brawl with a vicious dictator of the unfree world, and she was in a place as safe as any other to recover. Instead, over the next few days, Catra taunted Adora again about the She-Ra cape and tiara, attempted to climb out of the bed twice, sang a dozen of the Horde marching songs two notes off-key, and was generally so annoying that she thought Adora might strangle her in between meals.

There were certain things she couldn’t bring herself to say, though. The food, for one—because even though Adora was genuinely a bad cook (Catra thought the window-side flower wilted when Adora carried in the experimental potato-crab-venison dish), Catra could see her hopeful smile, and it reminded her of when they were both much younger, in the Horde, with a less colorful kitchen at Adora’s disposal. Adora would play house with Catra in what was retrospectively a desperately naïve and sad way at imitating the few families they would see within the Fright Zone: Catra had held rocks wrapped in blankets, which represented babies, and Adora chopped wood and stirred a pot of boiling water, calling it soup. Perhaps the whole ice cream mochi episode in the Ignia temple hadn’t been that crazy after all.

She also couldn’t bring herself to talk about Adora’s friends back in Brightmoon. The Brightmoon princess—Glimmer—Catra especially remembered for having suffered through a concentrated round of the torture Shadoweaver had usually inflicted on Catra. Catra hadn’t meant for that to happen. But it didn’t matter. She had brought the captives to Shadoweaver—she should have known. What had happened to Glimmer was one of the reasons that Catra made her own plans now.

Though Adora was clearly keeping Catra in her own house out of charity, she still took fairly rational precautions against Catra. After the first day, she was more careful in her answers to Catra’s questions, always looking for a trap—of which there were many, Catra would freely admit. Adora still kept mum on their exact location in relation to Brightmoon, as though Catra was going to launch a one-man coup against the Brightmoon queen.

“And the Map?” Catra asked, balancing the soup du jour—black sludge, ingredients uncertain—on her lap.

Adora arched up one eyebrow. “What about it?” The question had come after Catra tried to narrow the window of the Brightmoon castle’s guard shift times by asking Adora how often desserts arrived at the castle.

Catra waved to the orb that still resided, quietly, by her beside. “I know you’ve got a huge and obvious crush on me—” Adora flushed and, predictably, looked angry at her own flushing “—but even you can’t possibly let a high-ranking Horde officer get away with one of the First Ones’ sacred tech, or whatever that is.”

As she did whenever Catra reminded her that they were still on two sides of an ongoing cold war, Adora’s features folded back into neutrality. Adora was getting better at that now: presenting a blank face. She had always had that narrow-eyed Superior Officer’s Look down, but this was a diplomat’s face. It made her look older, until Catra realized, startled, that Adora _was_ older—more angular at the cheekbones and jaws, a steadiness in her shoulders. Grown into herself. Grown into the person that she had always meant to become.

“I did try,” Adora began, then looked embarrassed, and this Adora was familiar to Catra again. “I touched it when I was taking you in the house, but it—the Map sort of, well. Zapped me.”

Catra’s tail thumped behind her in surprise. “Zapped you?”

“It was a light zap, like static,” Adora reassured. “It was floating, glowing—I had to more or less herd it into the room next to you, grab one of my pillows—it would only take my softest.”

“Really?” Catra said, giving the Map a side look.

“I think it’s imprinted on you.”

“Like a spoiled child,” Catra agreed. She reached out and tapped it on top. “Hey, wake up, won’t you?”

The Map was filled from the center with a starburst of yellow and orange light. It came to hover by Catra’s shoulder. Catra watched Adora watch the motion with astonishment.

“I’m the only one who can get it to do that,” Catra said.

“It’s beautiful,” Adora said.

Catra nodded absentmindedly. She flicked at the orb, which slid away then right back again in the air. She hadn’t even realized it, but she supposed she missed the little bugger. But it was sluggish now in its movement. Sleepy. Catra guessed the little stunt it pulled at Dryl wasn’t going to be a repeat performance anytime soon.

“You know in Ignia, the hologram guardian there called me by this weird name,” Catra said. She wrinkled her nose. “ ‘The navigator.’ Lame. At least you got to be ‘the protector.’ Probably because of your dumb sword.”

“Yeah,” Adora said. “It’s like my sword.”

Adora’s eyes were on the orb, with a look of concentration that Catra knew meant her mind was running at a hundred miles per hour. Then she noticed Catra looking.

“Did you guys—did you guys ever figure out how to activate it?”

Catra nodded. “Show us the Satellite View,” Catra said to the orb. “Current location. Expand to an eighth of the quadrant. Tag with preset labels: ENTRPA-38920.”

A three-dimensional map of the Whispering Woods, Thaymor, and parts of Brightmoon expanded to fill the entire room. Villages, forests, streets all appeared, in live view, where major landmarks were labeled with names Entrapta had carefully coded for a good three days one-by-one. They were near Thaymor after all, just as Adora had said. She looked at the edge of Brightmoon—what was supposed to be shielded to outsiders, to all Horde tech after the battle two years ago, there in plain sight.

Adora took all this in, wide-eyed. Then, smiling self-deprecatingly, she said, “So much for me trying to hide our location.” She still hadn’t realized.

“So much for that,” Catra agreed.

Finally, Catra pointed to the outline of Brightmoon, in a corner. “This Map will be able to show the location of anything that relies on First Ones tech to stay hidden. That means Mystacor—and that means Brightmoon, with the wards that you guys borrowed from Mystacor. You can’t rely on that. Entrapta has already designed new wards for the Fright Zone.” She spun the projection like a globe and turned to the center of the continent. Where the Fright Zone should have been was just a stretch of desert. “You can develop your own or just—I don’t know, ask her for it. If you do it discreetly enough she’d probably be able to send you the blueprints without anyone in the Horde getting suspicious.”

Tired, Catra moved to rest her back against the pillows. Adora was silent for a long, long time.

“Why are you telling me this?” Adora asked.

“Think of it as rent. Hospitalization fees,” she said. “Anyway, I was going to get someone to send an intimidating letter to you guys and slip this in, but I’ll just tell you now that there’s no reason for the Horde to invade Brightmoon anymore.”

Adora stiffened. “And I’m supposed to believe that Lord Hordak will just leave us alone?”

“Hordak,” Catra said. “Hordak doesn’t know. Don’t worry about Hordak.”

Adora lingered for a moment more, before nodding. Whether or not Catra was telling the truth about Hordak, Catra thought, the truth of the matter was that their old wards didn’t work, and they would need to invent their own without relying on First Ones tech. Adora would need to notify Brightmoon.

Adora took Catra’s plate and stood. Catra cut off the projections and directed the Map to its little pillow bed. As she was closing her eyes to sleep, however, Adora reached down and squeezed her hand.

“Thank you,” she told Catra, then left.

 

 

Full recovery was still eons away, but it was clear to Catra by the third day in bedrest that Adora was engaging in a ferocious internal debate about what to do with Catra after Catra would be able to run around on her own two feet again. The correct thing to do would be to bring Catra back to Brightmoon, of course. Catra wasn’t just some no-name cadet in the Horde army anymore. She was a general; she had won battles for the Horde; her name meant something now, meant respect for the people within Horde occupation, meant something vile for those outside of it.

On more than one occasion, Catra thought to suggest handcuffs to the bedframe, if it would make Adora feel better. The sex jokes that came with it might be enough for Catra to go through the hassle of struggling out of the handcuffs.

Catra spent much of her time awake figuring out what it was that drove Adora to live like a hermit at the edge of Thaymor. It couldn’t have been anything as serious as banishment—she couldn’t have lived this closely to Brightmoon otherwise, and anyway, Catra doubted that the Rebellion would expel their most powerful weapon even if She-Ra had cut down a Rebellion princess. Adora talked about her Brightmoon friends in the present tense as well, and had offhandedly mentioned a couple of times that she received and sent letters from them. But Adora had a sort of guilt written all over her face, and she would wear the saddest sets of clothes Catra had ever seen—gray tunic, beige shorts, both made of heavy fabric—whose drabness transcended even Adora’s usual asceticism fashion-wise. Like a monk. Or a pilgrim, seeking absolution.

But most of all, Catra’s thoughts stayed on the Horde.

Bedridden, it was impossible for her to leave and gather news herself. She knew little of what had occurred within the Horde after she had left Hordak lying hollow on the floors of the Dryl palace—and despite her certainty at the time, her worry that Hordak had survived and long returned to the Fright Zone to punish all of Catra’s known associates increased every day.

Entrapta had masked the Fright Zone from Catra’s Map. Catra had asked her to do so, in the case that Catra herself did not return to the Fright Zone. Entrapta would assume that Hordak had ownership of the Map, and take all measures to delay his return before Scorpia returned. It would also mean that Catra was presumed dead.

Catra could not risk asking Adora about the Horde. If Adora knew that the Fright Zone was undergoing internal turmoil, it meant that Brightmoon knew, and the Rebellion knew. True, Adora might want to handle things delicately—she was familiar with the Horde’s internal structure and could likely guess what a vacuum that a missing Hordak _and_ his presumptive second-in-command would mean—but Catra had no assurances that the other princesses would want to. It would be a mess. A huge, bloody mess. The kind of mess Catra had been working from the start to prevent.

But not asking Adora about the Horde meant that Catra was cut off from her only source of communication to the rest of the world. All she had to draw on, now, was Adora’s silence.

 

 

There was another method to go about things, of course.

When it was nighttime, Catra slunk out of her bed and, inch by painful inch, moved over to the belt that Adora had placed on the dresser. From it she plucked out the small box that held the data crystal she had retrieved from Dryl, in what seemed like forever ago to her now.

She opened the box—and shut it at the first hint of a green glow.

Catra glanced out toward the half moon. Today was the day that Scorpia would return to the Fright Zone, she thought.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive the lack of fight scene. Thought it would be too contrived to create a whole bunch of lore explaining Hordak's ~*true form*~ (and also coming up with a ~*true form*~ to begin with) anyway, and we probably all just want to know what happens to Catra.


End file.
